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Why can't our library


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seperate books into age levels ? I mean it does and it doesn't . It just seperates the younger readers from the older reader books but there is a wide range when it comes to the older children readers .

We picked up a book called " The Midwife's Apprentice". My daughter saw it and I read the inside cover and it is a short book with about 17 chapters. So I thought , why not ? It sounded like a good story .

We get it home and got to reading it and the story went well and then I began to hit a few parts that I thought were just a little bit mature ( the young girl catching the midwife and the miller cheating with each other , a few swear words ) . I couldn't find a way to read around it either . So I read it in hopes she didn't pick it up ( which is rare because she is a very auditory learner and picks up everything she listens to ) . And of course she did . Sigh . My oldest is 10 so she can read what I'm reading while I read it .

 

I finished reading the book that night myself and it was fine enough to read after the few parts that we passed . But I guess I've learned my lesson about picking books I don't know much about .

All in all it is a good story and I don't think though and think its meant more for a teenaged level.

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Our library used to separate the 1st and 2nd grade from the 3rd through 5th, and on up that way. Honestly, it was so choppy that it drove me nuts. If I knew the author of a series (like, say, Little House) I couldn't automatically go to the shelf and find it -- I had to go to ALL the shelves and try to figure out which age group they lumped it in. They have since changed to one large grade school section, and one large "older" section. After that you go to the adult section.

 

And, frankly, when it was all chopped up sometimes I was surprised by where the books ended up, because then you get into whether the books are grouped by reading ability or by subject matter. Reading ability is easier to categorize; how appropriate the book's topic is for a certain age is much more subjective. For example, obviously, there need to be books for older teens that are written at about a 4th grade level so that the older teens who are still reading at that level have something to read. But, where should those be shelved? How does the teen with that reading level find them if they're shelved with the 4th grade stuff, or, on the other hand, they're shelved with the older teen stuff? It's really a sticky situation. I can see how libraries would just lump everything together and let the patrons sort it out.

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I think it would be *extremely* difficult to categorize books in that way -- how would you ever get anyone to agree? for instance, a trusted friend of mine who posts on these boards highly recommended that book when her oldest dd was about 9 -- and very difficult to find the books one wanted if they *were* categorized in that way.

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The inside of it's cover, that is. If a children's book was printed after 1960, and you're not familiar with it, pre-read it. If you're sensitive to "politically correct" speech, you might want to pre-read ALL books.

 

The children's section is full of books with nothing more to recommend them than that, at one time, they would have been banned.

 

People have very different ideas of what is appropriate for an 10 year old, so even if they did organize it by age levels, you would still have to pre-read.

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